scholarly journals Assessment of the Disaster Resilience of Complex Systems: The Case of the Flood Resilience of a Densely Populated City

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
pp. 2830
Author(s):  
Marcello Arosio ◽  
Luigi Cesarini ◽  
Mario L. V. Martina
Keyword(s):  
External Perturbation ◽  
Mathematical Representation ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Disaster Resilience ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Response And Recovery ◽  
United Nations General Assembly ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City ◽  
Practical Feasibility

In the last decades, resilience became officially the worldwide cornerstone to reduce the risk of disasters and improve preparedness, response, and recovery capacities. Although the concept of resilience is now clear, it is still under debate how to model and quantify it. The aim of this work was to quantify the resilience of a complex system, such as a densely populated and urbanized area, by modelling it with a graph, the mathematical representation of the system element and connections. We showed that the graph can account for the resilience characteristics included in its definition according to the United Nations General Assembly, considering two significant aspects of this definition in particular: (1) resilience is a property of a system and not of single entities and (2) resilience is a property of the system dynamic response. We proposed to represent the exposed elements of the system and their connections (i.e., the services they exchange) with a weighted and redundant graph. By mean of it, we assessed the systemic properties, such as authority and hub values and highlighted the centrality of some elements. Furthermore, we showed that after an external perturbation, such as a hazardous event, each element can dynamically adapt, and a new graph configuration is set up, taking advantage of the redundancy of the connections and the capacity of each element to supply lost services. Finally, we proposed a quantitative metric for resilience as the actual reduction of the impacts of events at different return periods when resilient properties of the system are activated. To illustrate step by step the proposed methodology and show its practical feasibility, we applied it to a pilot study: the city of Monza, a densely populated urban environment exposed to river and pluvial floods.

Assessment of the resilience to flood of a complex system: the case of densely populated city

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Arosio ◽  
Luigi Cesarini ◽  
Mario L.V. Martina
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Weighted Graph ◽  
External Perturbation ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Efficient Manner ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Response And Recovery ◽  
The City

<p>In the last decades, resilience officially become the worldwide cornerstone around which reducing the risk of disasters and improving preparedness, response and recovery capacities. The theoretical framework developed in this work is based on the resilience definition adopted in 2016 by United Nations General Assembly: “<em>the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management</em>”. This definition implies 2 main concepts that are the foundation of this work: 1) resilience is a property of a system and 2) a system is resilient when is able to dynamically react to a perturbation in order to maintain or resume its functionalities.</p><p>In order to reproduce the complex system of an urban environment, the proposed framework shows the assumptions and operational procedure to construct a weighted and redundant graph. The built graph has the ambition, under the constrains due to the data availability, to represent the interdependencies among the exposed elements, both in ordinary conditions and under perturbations such as disasters. The weight of the graph is represented by the population served by each single service. Furthermore, each element in case of an external perturbation, has the possibility to dynamically adapt and switch to a new graph configuration based on the redundancy and backup capacity of its providers.</p><p>The feasibility of the proposed approach is illustrated by an application to a case study in the densely populated urban environment of the city of Monza that is exposed to river and pluvial floods. The case study consists in a directed and weighted graph with 6000+ nodes and almost 1.3 million links. By means of the graph an estimation of the impacted and adapted nodes is made along with a measure of resilience to different flood scenarios for the city of Monza</p><p><em>Acknowledge: This research was partly funded by Fondazione Cariplo under the project “NEWFRAME: NEtWork-based Flood Risk Assessment and Management of Emergencies"</em></p>

Review Conference of the 1980 Weapons Convention

1995 ◽  
Vol 35 (307) ◽  
pp. 368-374
Author(s):  
Nikolay Khlestov
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
State Party ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
United Nations General Assembly ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Set Up

The United Nations General Assembly welcomed, in its resolution 48/79 of 16 December 1993, the request made to the organization's Secretary-General by a State party to the 1980 Weapons Convention (France) to convene a conference to review, in accordance with Article 8(3), the provisions of that Convention. In paragraph 6 of the same resolution, the General Assembly encouraged the States party to ask the Secretary-General to set up a group of government experts to prepare such a conference. The States did so and the group of experts that was subsequently brought together held three meetings in 1994 and one in 1995. Pursuant to a decision by the group, the Review Conference is to be held in Vienna from 25 September to 13 October 1995.

scholarly journals Delegating diplomacy: rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly

2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232199756
Author(s):  
Julia Gray ◽  
Alex Baturo
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Single Voice ◽  
United Nations General Assembly ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Career Incentives

When political principals send agents to international organizations, those agents are often assumed to speak in a single voice. Yet, various types of country representatives appear on the international stage, including permanent representatives as well as more overtly “political” government officials. We argue that permanent delegates at the United Nations face career incentives that align them with the bureaucracy, setting them apart from political delegates. To that end, they tend to speak more homogeneously than do other types of speakers, while also using relatively more technical, diplomatic rhetoric. In addition, career incentives will make them more reluctant to criticize the United Nations. In other words, permanent representatives speak more like bureaucratic agents than like political principals. We apply text analytics to study differences across agents’ rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly. We demonstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents, contradictory to conventional assumptions, with implications for our understandings of the interplay between public administration and agency at international organizations. Points for practitioners Delegations to international organizations do not “speak with one voice.” This article illustrates that permanent representatives to the United Nations display more characteristics of bureaucratic culture than do other delegates from the same country. For practitioners, it is important to realize that the manner in which certain classes of international actors “conduct business” can differ markedly. These differences in tone—even among delegates from the same principal—can impact the process of negotiation and debate.

What constitutes the sovereign state?

1996 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ross Fowler ◽  
Julie Marie Bunck
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
General Assembly Resolution ◽  
United Nations General Assembly

One might try to determine just what constitutes a sovereign state empirically, by examining the characteristics of states whose sovereignty is indisputable. All sovereign states, it might be observed, have territory, people, and a government. Curiously, however, cogent standards do not seem to exist either in law or in practice for the dimensions, number of people, or form of government that might be required of a sovereign state. Indeed, a United Nations General Assembly Resolution declared that neither small size, nor remote geographical location, nor limited resources constitutes a valid objection to sovereign statehood.

scholarly journals Could an optional protocol be the way to stop the weaponization of outer space?

2021 ◽  
pp. 002070202110205
Author(s):  
Paul Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Great Power ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Optional Protocol ◽  
Outer Space Treaty ◽  
United Nations General Assembly

Since the early 1980s, the United Nations General Assembly and its affiliated forum, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, has had the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space issue on its agenda. In the intervening years, the threat of weapons being introduced into the outer space realm has waxed and waned, but, in the main, a benign environment free from man-made threats has prevailed, allowing for great strides in the exploration and use of space. Recently, a renewal of great power rivalry including the development of offensive ‘counter-space’ capabilities has resurrected the spectre of armed conflict in space. With widespread political support for the non-weaponization of outer space, has the time come to give legal expression to this goal by means of an optional protocol to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty?

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